Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Corporate Owned Media Wants You On a "Plant-Based Diet"

Why do you think that is?

Every single day, I watch the local morning news - for the traffic and the weather. But it seems like the whole "plant-based diet" meme permeates every aspect of the news broadcasts programming, and the food product commercials shown between segments.

It's ubiquitous.

The commercial break will feature some low fat, whole grain cereal, followed by a spot for cholesterol lowering medication, and than back to the broadcast where they are giving tips on making some tasty, low-fat, vegetarian recipe. Than they'll do a spot on how the latest studies "show" that low-carb diets "may" reduce your life span.

Sometimes I just want to yell at the TV, "quit lying, you lying liars!"

But it doesn't end there.

People in real life that know me and my dietary lifestyle will than forward me emails, txts, or tell me that "my diet" will cause me to get heart disease or cancer..even though I lost weight and have kept it off for so long, I'm still slowly killing myself.

They know this, because they saw it on TV or heard it on the radio or read it in the paper...

It never ends.

I no longer even bother trying to explain to people how "scientific" studies that "prove" low-carb/high-animal protein/high-animal fat diets are usually statistical manipulations designed to mislead people into internalizing the meme that a "plant-based diet" is the key to good health.

I just tell them, "We're all gonna die sometime. When I die, I want to go knowing I ate good food and enjoyed life to the fullest. I had bacon and a 3-cheese-tomato-fresh basil omelette for breakfast, and it tasted damn good. What did you eat? A multi-grain cereal with skim milk and a piece of whole grain toast with low-fat margarine on it?"

That usually shuts 'em up.

Anyhow, yesterday's morning news broadcast once again had a report on "the latest studies show that a low carb diet is bad for you."

Conclusion: A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.

When I see this on the TV, I already know it's a lie.

But than you get people like Denise Minger, who actually look into the supposed research and prove that it is in fact, nothing but lies.

She notes:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: In most cases, abstracts tell you a whole ‘lotta nothing—so don’t judge a study until you’ve read the full text.

For right now, I’ll give this study the benefit of the doubt and ignore the fact that A) the researchers used a pretty lame decile-based scoring system* and B) employed the notoriously unreliable food-frequency questionnaire to collect their data.

Every time the researchers made multivariate adjustments to the data to account for the risk factors they did document (including physical activity, BMI, alcohol consumption, hypertension, and smoking, among other things), the hazard ratio went down for the Animal Group (meaning it got better) and it went up for the Vegetable Group (meaning it got worse). That indicates pretty clearly that the Animal Group had more proclivity to disease right from the get go, regardless of meat consumption, and the Vegetable Group may have been more health-aware than most folks. (To see what I’m talking about, look at the mortality tables under the “10″ column, and compare the “Age- and energy-adjusted HR” with the “Multivariate-adjusted HR” for each group.)

In other words, it looks like what this study really measured was a Standard American Diet group (aka Animal Group) and a slightly-less Standard American Diet group (aka Vegetable Group). Both ate sucky diets, but the latter had slightly less suckage. You can bet the farm that neither was anything close to “low carb.” And if you have two farms, you can bet the other one that neither diet group was anything near plant-based, so I’m not sure the vegan crowd has much to gloat about here.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1662484,00.html

Article on the low carb (ketogenic) diet as a cure for cancer.

I am on Phase One of Atkins, permanently, because I am hypoglycemic. Do you have any idea just how good hot lard tastes? Real lard I mean, not that white stuff they sell in the stores in the US that should be put on wheel bearings.

Turns out lard reduces dramatically the odds of heart attacks.

I tell my neighbors here in rural Mexico if they want to be healthy, ask the doctors lots of questions, make sure you understand everything they say, memorize every word, THEN DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

A cousin had 3 or 4 angina attacks a day, of unstable angina, the most dangerous type of all. He escaped death by a hair. When I learned he had angina that bad, I started him on Atkins, and he had his last attack three days later. he has lost 8.5 pounds, and no more angina at all.

It's amazing. I've been trying to get my parents to change their diet to meat + veggies for about a year now. But they can't shake all the media warnings they've heard about red meat, nor can they shake the "animal fat consumed = body fat" fallacy.

I think it's awesome that all of the truly satisfying food (animal meat and fat) is good for you.

One of the worse offenders is actually on a really good site, NaturalNews.com. While most of their stuff is useful and informative, they also perpetuate the vegetable protein nonsense.

Once you understand how animals are designed (including humans), you will understand that humans were designed as predators of other animals, hence the forward eyes for good depth perception, short digestive systems for ANIMAL material and also our teeth. These things are quite different even from great apes.

They push vegetable diets on people because this lowers the testosterone levels in the slave population and makes them less likely to reproduce and revolt.

There's another angle in the war against meat in the diet of us plebs, and that's the recurring cruelty to animals theme that does the rounds in all my local media regarding battery hens and sow crates. It just never lets up. Of course the solution to these 'problems' is free-range organic chicken and pork, which costs 3 or 4 times the price - thus putting it out of reach of many low income consumers. Oh well, there's always tofu and oatmeal I suppose.

If they were sincere about ending cruelty, why haven't we seen up close and personal footage of a fetus in its death throes, as a routine abortion is performed? We've had the sort of technology that shows exactly what sort of pain is inflicted on a living thing for decades now, but curiously, 60 minutes, 20/20 and all the other doco channels that choose our news for us haven't thought it seemly to show us exactly what goes on. But we will see the cruelty of an uncomfortable hog, or a chicken with its ass feathers plucked out by one of its cell mates.

I don't watch (network or cable) TV, so fortunately my family and I are not subject to those lies nearly so much as most people. Even most of the intelligent people I know don't want to hear about it. They might listen if I tell them what I know, but not actually change their eating practices. But if I send them a link to anything in-depth, they will completely ignore it. Why think when the TV can do it for you?

I really want to visit White and Nerdys site one more time and read the comments left by Thomas George. I think the attitude he displays why White and Nerdy hates conspiracy theorists with a much venom as he does.

This Thomas George dude is a perfect example of the uber mangina conspiracy theorist, why actually says the men's rights movement who real money behind it, even know the average man on the street has never even heard of the concept of "mens rights".

I do think it was wrong of White and Nerdy to judge you in the way that he did, and accusing you of being a "Neo-maxist" was just fucking stupid. But in light of that fanatical, foaming at the mouth mangina Thomas George, I think you can understand why White and Nerdy takes the stance he does with regards to those he labells "conspiracy theorists".

Anon 11:17 wrote: There's another angle in the war against meat in the diet of us plebs, and that's the recurring cruelty to animals theme that does the rounds in all my local media regarding battery hens and sow crates. It just never lets up. Of course the solution to these 'problems' is free-range organic chicken and pork, which costs 3 or 4 times the price - thus putting it out of reach of many low income consumers.

In a fiat-currency world, everything is driven by the bottom line. I'm sorry you have not internalized HL's work on Fiat Currency.

The best explanation of WHY you should avoid commodity foods like cruelty-suffused pork and chicken is here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/schmidt/schmidt16.html (see, especially, the penultimate paragraph). Fiat currency causes cruelty to children by straitening economic circumstances and devaluing honest effort and human life. Ending cruelty for animals thus makes it easier to end abortion: since the left sees no need for God or anything other than evolution, Man is an animal and it will be illegal to be cruel to him.